The nature of foreign negotiations requires caution, and their success must often depend on secrecy; and even when brought to a conclusion a full disclosure of all the measures, demands, or even concessions which may have been proposed or contemplated would be extremely impolitic; for this might have a pernicious influence on future negotiations, or produce immediate inconveniences, perhaps danger and mischief, in relation to other powers.
—PRESIDENT GEORGE WASHINGTON, ON HIS REFUSAL TO SHARE DOCUMENTS WITH CONGRESS ABOUT THE NEGOTIATIONS FOR JAY’S TREATY
Whoever allowed this combination of events to proceed could not have designed his work more destructively…. It was a ticking time bomb, ingeniously contrived and placed close to the President. It was only a matter of time before it detonated.
—JAMES SCHLESINGER ABOUT IRAN-CONTRA, DECEMBER 1986
THE STORY OF the Iran-Contra scandal is not easily told in an integrated chronological narrative.1 The matter exacerbated partisan divisions and raised deep constitutional issues in a way that must not only dominate any serious evaluation of the Reagan administration but also hold special significance in light of the second Iraq War and other aspects of the post-9/11 struggle against terrorism.
The seeds of the Contra half of the scandal were sown in the initial decision in 1981 to arm the Contras for the purpose of arms interdiction and pressure on the Sandinista regime while ostensibly eschewing the aim of overthrowing the Sandinistas, even though this was the real aim of the Contras themselves. The stop-start-stop-start actions Congress exhibited in the intermittent Contra funding bills, combined with the five Boland Amendments limiting or prohibiting Contra aid, not only disrupted policy but also obscured public perception of the deep partisan divide at the root of the matter. In other words, both Central American policy and political accountability were a muddle. The frequent congressional reversals on Contra aid were an object lesson of why foreign policy can’t be conducted by a committee of 535.
Nineteen eighty-six would see yet another reversal of congressional mood about Nicaragua policy. In 1985 Congress had reluctantly passed, and the White House had reluctantly accepted, a modest package of “humanitarian” (nonmilitary) aid to keep the Contras on life support while they found resources for arms elsewhere. To keep the CIA and the White House out of mischief, the aid was to be dispensed by a special State Department office. Democrats in Congress later complained when the aid was doled out slowly, inefficiently, and with poor accountability. How did they think it was going to work?
Everyone knew the White House was encouraging funds from overseas and private American sources and that Oliver North was involved in the effort. Congressman Lee Hamilton, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, cautioned the White House that it “would be well advised not to push the law too far,” but the law kept changing. In the fall the White House won some legal modifications from Congress in the annual intelligence authorization bill that weakened the latest iteration of the Boland Amendment. Among other changes, soliciting aid from foreign nations got an explicit green light, as did certain other forms of humanitarian aid to the Contras that plainly could be used for lethal purposes, such as trucks and aircraft. The whole matter was becoming a farce. As Robert Kagan summarized, “In the ever-shifting legal terrain shaped by Congress, donations like those of Saudi Arabia, not explicitly prohibited by Congress when first solicited by McFarlane in 1984, possibly illegal when next proffered in 1985, were now, perhaps, possible under the new legislation.”2
It was hardly a way to run a foreign policy with continuity. Still, there was good reason throughout the second half of 1985 to suppose that the Sandinistas had the Contras stalemated at worst, and perhaps checkmated in the fullness of time. Shrewd diplomacy on the part of the Sandinistas, such as stringing along the Contadora regional negotiating process, would have bolstered the Democratic opposition to Reagan on Capitol Hill and constricted Reagan’s latitude. Instead the Sandinistas made a series of fresh blunders that strengthened Reagan’s hand in Washington.
In the spring of 1985 Nicaragua’s bulging armed forces—as many as sixty thousand under arms by that point—began a series of incursions into Honduras to attack Contra base camps, and a series of smaller sorties against Contra positions in Costa Rica. This posed a problem for the United States. Even though everyone knew the Contras were operating out of Honduras, the Honduran government did not wish to acknowledge this publicly or draw attention to it, so its response was muted, and as a consequence so was the U.S. response. In fact, given the wavering U.S. support for the Contras, Honduras wondered whether it should kick the Contras out. Nicaraguan incursions into Honduras continued intermittently through the summer and fall of 1985. In November, a Nicaraguan helicopter the Contras shot down near the Honduran border was found to contain Cuban army soldiers.
Inside Nicaragua, the Sandinistas cracked down hard on their increasingly popular political opponents. The Sandinistas declared a state of emergency—the legal pretext for suspending constitutional rights of assembly and judicial appeals, closing down the Catholic radio station, and suspending the right to travel abroad. Effectively this made the country an Eastern European-style national prison. The government arrested and jailed more than a hundred political opponents, including all seven directors of an independent trade union. According to one estimate, the Sandinistas had jailed as many as seven thousand political prisoners and were manipulating rationing as a political tool. The remaining independent newspaper, La Prensa, was subjected to heightened censorship, and the regime deployed its political goon squads to disrupt anti-Sandinista public demonstrations, including the most potent symbol of the opposition, Catholic mass. Pope John Paul II ratcheted up the tension by making Nicaraguan archbishop Obando y Bravo a cardinal, a rare and significant promotion for Latin America. The cardinal openly supported the Contras and made an offer to mediate negotiations between the Sandinistas and the Contras, which the Sandinistas summarily rejected. The hostility between the regime and the Church intensified when the government expelled Bishop Pablo Antonio Vega in the summer of 1986.
Even sympathetic American liberals were dismayed at the Sandinistas’ course. Daniel Ortega came to New York in the fall to address the United Nations (and attracted criticism for buying expensive designer sunglasses in a Manhattan boutique). TV’s quintessential bleeding-heart liberal, Phil Donahue, pleaded with Ortega on his show, telling Ortega that his actions were “a tremendous public relations victory for the Reagan administration” and that the Sandinistas’ crackdown “looks like the work of a fascist government … You’ve snatched defeat from the jaws of victory! You’ve got the whole Catholic Church angry with you…. Let them speak! Your revolution is popular!”3
Other liberals were not as mulish as Donahue. The defection of a number of prominent liberals from the anti-Contra ranks had a decisive effect on the weakening of Democratic opposition to Contra aid in Congress. The Los Angeles Times noted in a front-page article at the end of 1985 that there was “a serious fraying of the Democrats’ once-solid front against the Reagan Administration’s policies in Central America.”4 Three defections in particular raised hackles on the left. The most significant was Robert Leiken of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Leiken had made his bones as an anti-Vietnam War activist in the 1960s and had opposed aid to the Contras in the early 1980s, but following a series of visits to Nicaragua in 1984 Leiken broke with the Left and published an article in the New Republic harshly critical of the Sandinistas and favorable to the Contras. “Each succeeding trip to Nicaragua drains my initial reservoir of sympathy for the Sandinistas,” Leiken wrote, “and disabused me of some of the remaining myths about the Sandinista revolution.”5
The second such figure was Bruce Cameron, a human rights lobbyist for Americans for Democratic Action. After Cameron, who was so far left in the 1960s that he had openly supported the Vietcong, came out in favor of Contra aid he was immediately fired from the ADA and removed from two boards of human rights organizations he had helped found. Other human rights activists who publicly criticized the Sandinistas, such as Nina Shea, were subject to threats and intimidation.
The third notable figure on the left was Paul Berman. In a series of articles in Mother Jones magazine, Berman highlighted the essential Leninism of the Sandinistas: “[T]he Sandinistas never gave up on Lenin’s idea of the vanguard party…. [N]o one seriously believes the Sandinistas mean to go so far with democracy as actually to engage in some form of power sharing, not even if the country and the revolution would be better off for it. So they are going to keep their near-monopoly of power, and they are not going to share it…. I think that American friends of the Sandinistas manage sometimes not to notice these ideas.”6 The purge mentality revealed in the reaction to Leiken, Cameron, and others was revealing. Leiken told the Los Angeles Times, “There is a purity test and I failed it. It’s very difficult for most liberals in Washington to move away from their fixed positions. There are so many vested interests involved: fellowships, positions, organizations.”7 Leiken, Cameron, and a handful of other Democrats were crucial in shifting moderate congressional Democrats toward Contra support.
The Sandinistas’ ideologically fueled intransigence explains why they were not more supple in their diplomacy, which George Shultz described as “remarkable ineptness.” It should have been an easy matter to string along the Contadora process and make suitably conciliatory noises, thereby giving ample political cover to congressional Democrats who opposed Contra aid in favor of negotiations. The Reagan administration would have been hard-pressed to continue Contra support had the Sandinistas displayed even superficial openness to negotiations, a modicum of interest in power sharing, and the slightest bit of military restraint. At one point the State Department even committed to disbanding the Contras if the Sandinistas agreed to a treaty. But the Sandinistas continued to reject successive drafts of a regional treaty put forth by their neighbors. Early in 1986 the Sandinistas suggested postponing further negotiations or scuttling Contadora altogether. This ham-handed intransigence on the part of the Sandinista leadership is explained by their fantastical Leninism. They actually wanted a direct U.S. intervention in Nicaragua because, as one Sandinista official told Robert Leiken in Managua, it would “vastly accelerate the Latin American revolution against U.S. imperialism.” An astounded Leiken said he had considered this Sandinista to be “a moderate.”8
The bad faith of the Sandinistas began to change the political landscape in Washington. Even Ted Kennedy began to speak harshly of the Sandinista regime. Early in 1986 Reagan and his foreign policy team decided they wouldn’t have to settle again for a weak package of humanitarian aid. On January 10 Reagan sent to the Hill a $100 million request for the Contras, with $70 million allocated for military aid. In addition, he demanded that restrictions on CIA and Pentagon direct assistance to the Contras be lifted. Tip O’Neill remained staunchly opposed, confiding to a friend, “I believe [Reagan’s] policies are absolutely immoral. It appears he won’t be happy until American troops are in Central America.”9 This became a favorite liberal refrain; Representative Marty Russo of Illinois said during a visit to Argentina that “Reagan’s not going to be happy until he gets into a war in Central America.” Despite the weakening position of the Sandinistas, O’Neill and the House Democratic leadership appeared strong enough to beat back Reagan’s Contra request.
Privately Reagan was adamant in his opposition to direct U.S. military involvement in Central America—he repeatedly noted his strong feelings on this in his diary—but his public rule of never say never kept him from disputing the Democrats when they waved the bloody shirt. Instead Reagan and his team decided to hit back: he turned White House communications director Pat Buchanan loose to launch a partisan attack. In early March Buchanan wrote in the Washington Post that Democrats had become, “with Moscow, co-guarantor of the Brezhnev doctrine in Central America.” How the Democratic Party came down on Contra aid, Buchanan charged, “will reveal whether it stands with Ronald Reagan and the resistance—or Daniel Ortega and the communists.” Democrats cried foul, and denounced the White House for a return to “Red-baiting McCarthyism.”
Reagan didn’t leave the rough stuff just to Buchanan. First in a weekend radio address and then in a prime-time televised speech to the nation on March 16, Reagan denounced the totalitarian and expansionist nature of the Sandinista regime. In a flourish redolent of John F. Kennedy’s speeches about Cuba, Reagan pointed to a map of Central America in describing the flow of arms and mischief emanating from Nicaragua. He mentioned evidence of Sandinista revolutionary intent that was gleaned from documents captured in the Grenada invasion in 1983, and again embraced the Contras as freedom fighters deserving American support.
Reagan then turned up the heat directly on House Democrats:
Now comes the crucial test for the Congress of the United States. Will they provide the assistance the freedom fighters need to deal with Russian tanks and gunships, or will they abandon the democratic resistance to its Communist enemy? In answering that question, I hope Congress will reflect deeply upon what it is the resistance is fighting against in Nicaragua. Ask yourselves: What in the world are Soviets, East Germans, Bulgarians, North Koreans, Cubans, and terrorists from the PLO and the Red Brigades doing in our hemisphere, camped on our own doorstep? Is that for peace? Why have the Soviets invested $600 million to build Nicaragua into an armed force almost the size of Mexico’s, a country 15 times as large and 25 times as populous. Is that for peace? Why did Nicaragua’s dictator, Daniel Ortega, go to the Communist Party Congress in Havana and endorse Castro’s call for the worldwide triumph of communism? Was that for peace?
Not content with a statement of the case as he saw it, Reagan made a clever appeal to bipartisanship in foreign policy that highlighted how such bipartisanship was a thing of the past—a breach that, by implication, was the responsibility of a faction of Democrats. As he had in his 1983 and 1984 speeches about Central America, Reagan invoked Harry Truman and the Truman Doctrine:
If we fail, there will be no evading responsibility—history will hold us accountable. This is not some narrow partisan issue; it is a national security issue, an issue on which we must act not as Republicans, not as Democrats, but as Americans. Forty years ago Republicans and Democrats joined together behind the Truman doctrine. It must be our policy, Harry Truman declared, to support peoples struggling to preserve their freedom. Under that doctrine, Congress sent aid to Greece just in time to save that country from the closing grip of a Communist tyranny. We saved freedom in Greece then. And with that same bipartisan spirit, we can save freedom in Nicaragua today.
Just to be sure no one missed the point, Reagan closed with a quotation from Clare Boothe Luce: “‘Through all time to come, this, the 99th Congress of the United States, will be remembered as that body of men and women that either stopped the Communists before it was too late—or did not.’” Representative Mike Barnes, a staunch opponent of any Contra aid, said, “We just didn’t have the votes if Reagan ever presented it that way.”10 Reagan’s aggressiveness presented Democrats with a dilemma. While most opposed Contra aid, they were wary of being blamed if they blocked Reagan wholesale and the region slipped into chaos. By raising the stakes, Reagan upset the delicate political equilibrium.
However, despite his speech and the political offensive, public opinion still wasn’t moving in Reagan’s favor on the issue. “The numbers aren’t with us on this,” pollster Richard Wirthlin told the White House, “and they aren’t changing.” An ABC News poll after the speech found that 60 percent of Americans still opposed Contra aid, though public sentiment was clearly fluid, as other polls showed an uptick in approval for Reagan’s general handling of Central America. “Our people do not support what we’re trying to do in Nicaragua,” Reagan ruefully noted in his diary. Polls in Central American nations, however, showed strong support for the Contras. Gallup found 69 percent support for the Contras in Costa Rica, 55 percent in Honduras, 54 percent in Guatemala, and 52 percent in El Salvador.11
On the eve of the House vote, the New Republic widened the fissures among liberals with a long editorial endorsing military aid and criticizing liberal opposition:
What is at stake in this civil war is any hope for a democratic Nicaragua. The end of the contras means the end of hope. And a ban on military aid will mean, sooner or later, the end of the contras. One would think that House Democrats, who for years have been urging, pushing, encouraging, threatening, and finally celebrating the return of democracy to the Philippines, would be eager to see democracy returned to Nicaragua. But they are not. Why? They put up a case that we find, for an issue of this gravity, stunningly weak.12
Thirteen contributing editors to the magazine signed a letter of protest against the editorial, demonstrating the level of rancor over the issue.
Three days after Reagan’s TV address the House voted on his request. Tip O’Neill took the unusual step of making an impassioned speech from the well of the House against Contra aid, and cast his vote when the roll opened, which the Speaker rarely does. Reagan lost the initial House vote in March by the close vote of 222–210, with sixteen House Republicans voting against him. However, O’Neill had scored only a short-term tactical victory. A majority supported Reagan’s proposal, but O’Neill was able to persuade a handful of moderate Democrats to stick with him for the moment in hopes of a last-minute diplomatic concession from Managua. Instead, the next day Nicaragua launched a fresh attack on the Contras across the border in Honduras. Honduras rushed five thousand troops toward the border, and when Nicaragua shot down a Honduran helicopter inside Honduran territory it appeared a war between the two nations might break out. After hesitation by the timorous Honduran government, which initially denied in public that a Nicaraguan attack had taken place, the Hondurans requested U.S. assistance. When U.S. helicopters began transporting Honduran troops to staging areas near the border, Nicaragua got the message and backed off.
Democrats who opposed Reagan were once again embarrassed and angry with the Sandinistas. Tip O’Neill called Ortega “a bumbling, incompetent Marxist-Leninist Communist.” A last-ditch effort to revive the Contadora process fizzled when the Sandinistas refused to consider a fresh round of concessions. It was a foregone conclusion that when the Contra aid package came up for reconsideration in the House in late June, it passed 221–209, with several of the previous Democratic no votes switching sides. Over in the Senate, which voted several weeks after the House, a number of Democrats also switched sides, most notably New Jersey’s Bill Bradley. Virginia’s new Democratic senator, Chuck Robb, said, “Americans won’t stand behind a party that won’t stand up for American values and interests abroad.”
Although the restoration of military aid for the Contras represented a significant political victory for Reagan, his Nicaragua policy was still incoherent. Even with fresh military aid in the pipeline, the Contras would not be strong enough to overthrow the Sandinistas by force. No one held out much hope that Contra pressure would succeed in compelling the Sandinistas to allow a genuinely pluralistic democracy. The United States still maintained diplomatic relations with Nicaragua, eschewing the step of breaking relations and recognizing an exile government, which would have made U.S. policy more robust and direct. Several conservatives openly advocated such a course, but it was a nonstarter with Reagan and the State Department, as was the desire of some conservative leaders for direct U.S. military intervention to topple the Sandinistas. Reagan repeatedly expressed his opposition to direct intervention in his diary.13 U.S. policy looked to be playing for time.
The slowness of the legislative and administrative process meant that cash and arms wouldn’t begin reaching the Contras until late in the fall. Furthermore, the Boland Amendment’s restrictions on CIA involvement would remain in force until October. Oliver North was intent on keeping the Contras alive in the interim with his private supply effort, abetted by the diversion of funds from the Iran arms-for-hostages effort, which entered a new phase in the spring of 1986.
* * *
DURING THE FIRST week in January 1986 Oliver North’s idea to have the United States deal directly with Iran was complicated by a new Israeli proposal to act as middleman once again. This time, the United States would need to supply one thousand TOW missiles to Israel in advance, rather than replenishing Israeli inventory after the fact. The deal included something new: Iran wanted some U.S. intelligence information to aid in their war against Iraq, and also supposedly against Soviet incursions into Iranian air space. Here was the tantalizing hook that baited American interest and made the release of the hostages not so much a goal to be reached as an obstacle to be overcome in the interest of larger strategic questions.
All five American hostages were to be freed in the deal, after which Israel would also release a number of Hezbollah prisoners in their custody. In a series of National Security Council meetings in early January, over the continuing objections of Shultz and Weinberger but with the support of Casey and Vice President Bush, Reagan authorized the initiative to go forward. Reagan’s later claim that he did not regard the initiative as primarily a straight arms-for-hostages deal is superficially buttressed by the terms of the finding, which placed the hostages third behind the objectives of encouraging a more moderate government in Iran (the United States, incredibly, believed a report that Khomeini was going to step down within weeks) and gaining counter-terrorism intelligence.
Later in January North headed to London to meet with Ghorbanifar, who was still the key middleman despite McFarlane’s negative account of their December meeting and despite having dismally failed a new CIA polygraph examination (in which, according to several accounts, the polygraph registered that he was lying about his own name). In February a second meeting ensued in Frankfurt, West Germany, between North and an Iranian official whose exact position in Iran’s government remained uncertain; from this meeting further confusion ensued. The one thousand TOW missiles were sent to Iran in two shipments in late February on Israeli airplanes. But no hostages were released. The Iranians complained through Ghorbanifar that the intelligence they received from the United States was “garbage,” and furthermore, they wanted more and better missiles—three thousand more TOWs, along with HAWKs and Phoenix missiles suitable for shooting down high-altitude Soviet aircraft. North and his CIA adjuncts complained bitterly of having to put up with “rug merchant tactics” and wanted desperately to cut out Ghorbanifar as their principal point of contact with Iran, wondering whether he had correctly communicated U.S. demands that hostages be released as a part of the deal.
But Ghorbanifar’s Iranian connections seemed good enough that, lacking an alternative channel, North and Poindexter decided there was no choice but to continue to work through him. North was mesmerized by the tantalizing prospect of a U.S. representative meeting directly with someone at the highest level of the Iranian government—it was suggested that it would be Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, speaker of the parliament—to work out the deal. North was also enthusiastic about the prospect of diverting significant profits from further arms sales to the Contras—as much as $12 million. In a five-page memo outlining the arms transactions North included a paragraph explicitly detailing the diversion plan; North passed the memo up the line for approval to Poindexter and, he hoped, President Reagan, but no copy with Reagan’s signature was ever found.14
Out of this mess of mixed communication and doubtful motives was hatched the mission of sending Robert McFarlane to Tehran as the personal representative of President Reagan; it was hoped he could broker the release of all the hostages before any further arms were shipped. Ghorbanifar assured a wary McFarlane that he would meet with Rafsanjani, President Ali Hosayni Khamenei, and possibly the Ayatollah Khomeini’s son Ahmed. On May 25 North and McFarlane traveled to Tehran equipped with phony Irish passports, suicide pills for use in the event of capture, and one pallet of HAWK missile parts.
McFarlane knew right away that something was amiss when there were no officials of any rank at the airport to meet their arriving plane. He and North were hustled off to a downtown hotel, narrowly avoiding arrest by Iranian Revolutionary Guards only after a parking-lot scuffle had taken place. When McFarlane was finally able to meet with low-level Iranian officials, it became immediately clear that Iran had taken no steps to secure the release of the hostages in Lebanon and was more interested in abusing the visiting Americans than in striking a deal. Ghorbanifar had misled both sides about what the other was prepared and able to deliver. McFarlane, disgusted, was ready to leave immediately.
But a second meeting was convened the next day, and then a third, at which time a more senior figure, an adviser to Speaker Rafsanjani, turned up. The mood improved slightly, with the outline of a possible deal once again seemingly in sight. The United States would dispatch another plane with additional missile parts if Iran would broker the hostages’ release while the plane was en route. North and McFarlane were nearly ready to relent to an Iranian counteroffer to trade two hostages for the shipment of arms, with two more hostages to follow after the arms had arrived. But after more meetings and fresh contortions, this deal fell apart too. McFarlane and North packed up and left. The failure of McFarlane’s mission, Reagan wrote in his diary, “was a heartbreaking disappointment for all of us.” Some good came of the errant venture, North thought. They received full payment for the partial shipment of weapons they had brought along, so at least the Contras would be getting some support out of the deal (more than $3 million, in fact). The Iranians complained, with reason, that they had been ripped off.
Once again the arms-for-hostages gambit should have ended. It didn’t. The administration was now so desperate about the hostages that a military rescue operation was considered, but rejected for want of adequate intelligence. As spring gave way to summer a CIA agent, George Cave, and an Israeli named Amiram Nir, both of whom had been part of the North-McFarlane mission to Tehran, continued communicating with Iranian contacts about reviving the arms-for-hostages exchange. Ghorbanifar, whom all sides thoroughly distrusted by this point, somehow remained in the middle of the affair.
In late July a breakthrough seemed to have occurred: Iran released a hostage—Father Lawrence Jenco, who had been held since January 1985. But this goodwill gesture on the part of the Iranians turned out to be another of Ghorbanifar’s manipulations: unbeknownst to the United States, he had told Iran that the United States would make good on the remaining HAWK arms shipment from May if Iran arranged the release of a hostage. North and Poindexter were furious. Poindexter noted bitterly in a memo that Ghorbanifar had “cooked up a story that if Iran could make a humanitarian gesture then the U.S. would deliver the rest of the parts and then Iran would release the rest of the hostages.” But it was enough to restart the escapade, and they honored the U.S. end of Ghorbanifar’s deal, sending 240 HAWK missiles to Iran on August 4. With Reagan’s approval, North headed back to Europe in early August to resume negotiations with Iran to swap arms for hostages.
North and his intermediaries had become thoroughly disgusted with Ghorbanifar, and they opened a new channel to Iran through Ali Hashemi Bahramani, the supposedly moderate nephew of Iranian parliament Speaker Rafsanjani. North hosted Bahramani in Washington and even extended him the privilege of a late-night tour of the White House. While North began to negotiate another sequence of arms-for-hostages deals in early September, two more Americans were taken hostage in Beirut: Frank Herbert Reed and Joseph Cicippio. North’s new Iranian contacts said they were taken by a Lebanese faction with whom Iran had little influence. A month later yet another American, Edward Tracy, would be seized. Still negotiations proceeded.
Among the requests the new set of Iranian interlocutors presented was one of particular irony: couldn’t the United States please take out Iran’s archenemy, Saddam Hussein? In one conversation that was taped, North assured Bahramani that “he [President Reagan] knows that Hussein is a shit.” The translator asked North, “Do you want me to translate that?” North: “Go ahead. That’s his word, not mine.” Despite North’s professed sympathy for removing Hussein, Iran wasn’t going to get the United States to do its dirty work against Iraq (yet), but after the usual back-and-forth with the Iranians another deal was struck in early October, the same day Reagan departed Washington to face off with Gorbachev in Reykjavik. Iran would get five hundred TOW missiles; the United States would get one hostage. There was talk that perhaps more hostages would be freed if Kuwait released some or all of the seventeen Shiite prisoners currently being held.
The TOW shipment arrived in Iran on October 28; five days later hostage David Jacobsen was released in Beirut. North and his team flew off to Mainz, West Germany, to follow up with Bahramani and press for more hostages to be released. Bahramani promised that more hostages would be let go shortly, but also conveyed the worrisome news that a student faction in Iran had published leaflets about the arms-for-hostages transactions that had all the essential details. There had already been talk in the Middle Eastern rumor mill that the Americans had been dealing with Iran over arms and hostages, and it now appeared that the entire covert house of cards was on the brink of collapse.
On November 3 the story blew wide open. The Lebanese newspaper Al-Shiraa published a detailed account of what had taken place, including McFarlane’s secret trip to Tehran in May. The next day—Election Day back in the United States—the Iranian government confirmed the story, but also sent word to North that they hoped the operation would continue. Amazingly, Poindexter and North still wanted to carry on with more arms transactions in spite of the public disclosure; Shultz forcefully put an end to this nonsense. The news immediately set off a mad scramble inside the White House as a media frenzy erupted.
As Poindexter and North began covering their tracks, including preparing false chronologies of events and destroying documents, Reagan made the first of several serious mistakes. Three days after the Al-Shiraa story broke, Reagan denied it, saying there was “no foundation” to the report of McFarlane’s secret trip and stating, “We will never pay off terrorists because that only encourages more of it.” At a White House appearance the next day with freed hostage David Jacobsen, Reagan and Jacobsen pleaded with the press to stop pursuing the matter, as their agitation threatened to prevent the release of other hostages. North and his crew were at that moment in Geneva meeting again with the Iranians hoping for yet another deal.
There was no way Reagan’s position was going to hold or the media frenzy die down. Early the following week Reagan delivered a televised speech to the nation and held a follow-up press conference. While admitting that the initiative had been a “high-risk gamble,” Reagan said that “[t]he United States has not made concessions to those who hold our people captive in Lebanon, and we will not.” In his mind the indirect connections between the United States and the hostage takers by way of Iran was enough for him to believe he had not contradicted U.S. policy. But he did admit to the two-step dynamic of the operation: “During the course of our secret discussions, I authorized the transfer of small amounts of defensive weapons and spare parts for defensive systems to Iran. My purpose was to convince Tehran that our negotiators were acting with my authority, to send a signal that the United States was prepared to replace the animosity between us with a new relationship. These modest deliveries, taken together, could easily fit into a single cargo plane.” This last claim was untrue, though Reagan repeated it again at his press conference a few days later. He also denied at the press conference that Israel had been involved. An hour after the press conference ended, Reagan put out a correction, admitting that “there was a third country involved in our secret project with Iran.”
The damage control effort was not off to a good start. A Los Angeles Times poll found that only 14 percent of Americans believed Reagan’s denial that he had swapped arms for hostages, and over the next few weeks Reagan’s overall approval rating plummeted from 67 percent to 46 percent. It was the largest one-month decline in the history of the Gallup poll; by February 1987 Reagan had fallen further, to a 40 percent approval rating. The Iran initiative not only appeared to defy policy; it defied common sense. If there was one country Americans hated more than the Soviet Union, it was Iran. Reagan himself had described Iran a few months before as an “outlaw state, run by the strangest collection of misfits, looney tunes and squalid criminals since the advent of the Third Reich.” Republican governor William Janklow of South Dakota said, “There are not five people out there who want to send arms to Iran. The only way we want to give them arms is dropping them from the bay of a B-1 bomber.” Another pithy sound bite that accurately captured the cognitive dissonance of the story came from an unnamed Reagan appointee: “It’s like suddenly learning that John Wayne had secretly been selling liquor and firearms to the Indians.”
The media feasted on anonymous sources in the State Department, Pentagon, and CIA who had opposed the operation and who relished the opportunity to trash North and the NSC. Congress was in an uproar and announced plans for hearings. The White House briefly considered invoking executive privilege against congressional demands for documents and testimony, but backed off for fear of a political firestorm.15 As senior administration officials prepared for the weekend news talk shows and hastily arranged congressional hearings, it became apparent that there was deep confusion about what actually had taken place and whether correct legal procedures had been followed. The proximate issue was the circumstances of the HAWK missile shipment of September 1985; there was much that seemed amiss, from the CIA’s knowledge and involvement to whether Reagan had approved it. And the only people who knew, chiefly Poindexter and North, were busy covering their tracks. Speculation grew that Shultz was going to resign; in fact, he had passed word to Reagan that he would resign unless Reagan fired National Security Adviser Poindexter. Reagan noted archly in his diary, “I don’t like ultimatums.”
Outgoing senator Barry Goldwater bluntly expressed the problem: “I think President Reagan has gotten his butt in a crack on this Iran thing,” calling it “probably one of the major mistakes the United States had ever made in foreign policy.” Washington was abuzz with the phrase that the Iranian escapade could be a “new Watergate,” a fact Reagan noted bitterly in his diary: “This whole irresponsible press bilge about hostages and Iran has gotten totally out of hand. The media looks like it’s trying to create another Watergate.” He had no idea the other shoe was about to drop.
* * *
AT THE SAME time the secrecy of the Iranian arms dealing was starting to unravel, the veil over North’s Contra supply operation was coming undone too. On October 5 the Sandinistas shot down a cargo plane carrying weapons for the Contras that had been chartered by North’s operation. The pilots were killed, but one of the crew, Eugene Hasenfus, survived and was captured. The Sandinistas paraded Hasenfus in front of the media, and his photo appeared on the front page of U.S. newspapers the next day. Under interrogation Hasenfus admitted the CIA’s involvement in his mission, identifying by name a CIA agent operating in El Salvador. The U.S. government, including Reagan, denied any U.S. involvement. “There was no government connection with that at all,” Reagan told reporters. Administration officials, including North and Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America Elliott Abrams (though Abrams was unaware of North’s fund diversion from the Iran arms sales), had testified in various congressional hearings that they were not involved in the private Contra supply efforts. The latest Boland Amendment’s restrictions on CIA involvement with the Contras were to be lifted as of October 17, but the capture of Hasenfus indicated that someone in the U.S. government had jumped the gun and violated a law still in force. The most worrisome red flag was that the downed plane had been chartered from Southern Air Transport—the same company that the CIA had used to make one of the arms shipments to Iran.
As the controversy boiled over into its third week and concern mounted among lawyers at the White House, State Department, and CIA, Attorney General Ed Meese launched an internal investigation to clear up the discrepancies in the stories being told, along with other unresolved factual and legal questions. Assistant Attorney General William Bradford Reynolds was reviewing National Security Council documents from Oliver North’s files on Saturday morning, November 22, when he came across the North memo from the previous April that summarized the TOW missile transaction of September 1985. When Reynolds came to a paragraph stating that “$12 million [of the proceeds] will be used to purchase critically needed supplies for the Nicaraguan Democratic Resistance,” he said, “Holy shit!”
Meese confronted North the next day. North, who by that time had shredded hundreds of documents, was surprised that he had missed one. But he improvised on the spot, claiming the diversion of funds to the Contras was an Israeli operation from start to finish, with minimal involvement by him. Meese, sensing a cover-up and knowing the political disaster that it would cause, decided the matter needed to be publicly disclosed as soon as possible. Meese and his assistants weren’t immediately sure whether the diversion was necessarily illegal, but the specter of impeachment was plain.
One very large question loomed: had Reagan known about this? The circumstantial evidence suggests he did not. Don Regan said that “the color drained from Reagan’s face” when Meese told him of the diversion the next morning. In his diary Reagan wrote: “Our Col. North (NSC) gave the money [from the Iran arms sale] to the ‘Contras.’ This was a violation of the law against giving the Contras money without authorization from Congress. North didn’t tell me about this.” Reagan later told the media, in response to a question as to whether he could have forgotten he had been told: “Oh, no. You would have heard me without opening the door if I had been told that.” North’s “diversion memo,” as it came to be known, included the standard check boxes at the end for Reagan to indicate his approval or disapproval. There was no check mark on the copy Meese’s team had found and there is no other evidence that North’s memo ever got to Reagan, which doesn’t rule out the possibility that Reagan could have seen or checked off another of the five copies of the diversion memo that North is known to have prepared and destroyed.
Don Regan observed: “I doubt there was a single reporter who believed in his or her heart that Oliver North, a mere lieutenant colonel, had done what he had done without the approval of higher—much higher—authority.”16 Much later North would assert that Reagan knew of the diversion and approved “enthusiastically,” though North never claimed to have received a signed copy of the diversion memo. But North was a decidedly less-than-trustworthy source. (In the weeks after the initial scandal broke—but before the diversion was discovered—North put out one story to sympathetic journalists that the Iranian arms transactions were part of an urgent initiative to prevent a Soviet invasion of Iran. To an NSC colleague, North put out a markedly different story—that he had ordered the kidnapping of senior Iranian officials, whom he was planning to swap for the American hostages.)17 Reflecting on this claim, Peter Wallison wrote, “I have never understood why North—who can so easily call Ronald Reagan a liar—has been treated as a hero by the same people who profess to admire Reagan.”18 The final irony is that the enemies and critics of Reagan who hoped to take him down with his approval of a possibly illegal act were hoisted by their own petard: having claimed for six years that Reagan was “out of touch” and a “creature of his staff,” they were now stuck with a narrative theme that made his denials wholly plausible to the public. “What did Reagan know,” Jeff Greenfield asked, “and when did he forget it?”
The question of Reagan’s direct knowledge, while important, was secondary because he was responsible and accountable as chief executive for the actions of his administration. As soon as Reagan disclosed the diversion in a tumultuous press conference the next day (along with the firings of Poindexter and North), it was inevitable that Washington would go into full-scale post-Watergate scandal mode, complete with televised congressional hearings, a special presidential commission, an independent counsel investigation that would last years, and above all a media feeding frenzy.
Over the next three months the Washington Post published 555 separate stories about the scandal; the New York Times printed 509. The glittering spectacle of a Watergate rerun was on the mind of every partisan Democrat in Washington. Despite all the sanctimonious pontificating of the pundits and “responsible” party leaders on the disastrous prospect of “another failed presidency,” liberals and most Democrats were positively giddy—a fact that Michael Kinsley was at least honest enough to admit: “Am I really the only one here who is having a good time? Simple honesty requires any Washington type to admit that this is the kind of episode we all live for. The adrenaline is flowing like Perrier…. Dry those tears and repeat after me: Ha. Ha. Ha.”19 “Young reporters all over town have visions of Pulitzer Prizes dancing in their heads,” Hugh Sidey admitted in Time. Liberal author Greg Grandin recalled the mood: “Democrats couldn’t believe their luck. After years of banging their heads on Reagan’s popularity and failing to derail his legislative agenda, they had not only taken back the Senate, but follow-up investigations soon uncovered a scandal of epic proportions, arguably the most consequential in American history, one that seemed sure to disgrace every single constituency that had fueled the upstart conservative movement. The Reagan Revolution, it appeared, had finally been thrown into reverse.”20
In other words, it was showtime in Washington.
* * *
THE FIRST AND most immediate difficulty for Reagan and the White House staff was that they simply didn’t know all the facts. Key documents had been destroyed. The central figures, especially Poindexter and North, had lawyered up and weren’t talking, and couldn’t be trusted even if they did talk. Rumors flew that Poindexter and North would implicate Reagan as having had full knowledge of the diversion. But North and Poindexter, called hastily before congressional hearings, pled the Fifth and refused to testify.
Reagan was determined not to repeat the blunders of Nixon that had protracted the Watergate agony, so he quickly (but unwisely) waived executive privilege with regard to White House documents, sought the appointment of an independent counsel to pursue possible criminal charges, and brought in a cabinet-level outside counselor, the well-regarded David Abshire, to troubleshoot the matter from inside the White House and coordinate with the special Tower Commission that Reagan appointed to look into the matter. These decisions, taken in understandable haste, meant yielding much of the principled ground upon which to defend his policy and his administration.
These concessions exacerbated the second problem: getting Reagan to acknowledge and admit publicly what really had happened—an ill-advised arms-for-hostages transaction with Iran. “As the crisis continued,” Peter Wallison wrote, “the White House staff came unanimously to the conclusion that the President should tell the American people that he had made a mistake by not properly supervising his national security staff. To us, this was an easy call—reminiscent of Kennedy’s successful mea culpa after the Bay of Pigs.” Reagan stoutly resisted this advice. Wallison attributes his stubbornness to the implicit rebuke it would have meant for Reagan’s delegation-heavy management style.21 But Reagan was also misled by his potent imagination. As far back as the TWA 847 hijacking crisis, he had entertained the view that meeting terrorist demands without directly bargaining with terrorists—through the kind of indirect, two-steps-removed process that became central to the Iranian arms transactions—was compatible with his sense of morals and honor. To be told otherwise was a bitter pill. “I don’t care if I am the only person in America that does not believe it,” Reagan barked at David Abshire when Abshire tried to persuade him of the necessity to acknowledge arms-for-hostages; “I don’t believe it was arms for hostages.”22 It was going to be an uphill battle to change his mind.
Several other well-known Reagan traits were in evidence in the early going of the controversy, such as his reluctance to fire people who deserved it. He expressed genuine regret at Poindexter’s departure (technically a resignation, but in reality a firing), and he called Oliver North on the telephone to express sympathy and laud him as “an American hero.” (It would be some weeks before Reagan, better informed about North’s improvisations, became shocked and angry.) And he mishandled the dismissal of Chief of Staff Don Regan, at first resisting the mounting calls (including from Vice President Bush and the first lady) for his firing, and then failing to execute the deed in a dignified manner. In his encounters with the Tower Commission he was confused and contradictory, displaying lack of memory of key details (such as whether he had approved the first arms shipment to Iran before or after the fact) and ultimately drafting a disconcerting letter in which he pled that “I don’t remember—period. I’m afraid that I let myself be influenced by others’ recollections, not my own.” Above all, by every account his reserves of optimism and cheerfulness were fully depleted; at times he was visibly downcast or subdued. His annual State of the Union speech to Congress, delivered on January 27, 1987, ten days before his seventy-sixth birthday, was widely panned as a lackluster performance for the Great Communicator. (The fact that Reagan unveiled the federal government’s first trillion-dollar budget, not the kind of milestone to make a conservative cheerful, contributed to the downbeat mood.) His own advisers commiserated that the administration was “dead in the water,” and after the last lingering contacts with Iran regarding further arms-for-hostage swaps were finally ended decisively in January, three more Americans were taken hostage in Beirut: Robert Polhill, Alann Steen, and Jesse Turner.
It took the Tower Commission report, released the last week of February, to begin to turn the tide. The report was harsh on Reagan for his lax management style, and also gave low scores to all of Reagan’s top appointees, including Shultz and Weinberger, but especially his national security advisers, McFarlane and Poindexter. The normal deliberative and review processes of the National Security Council were not followed, and the NSC was improperly placed in charge of conducting covert operations directly. “The NSC system will not work unless the President makes it work,” the Tower Commission concluded in its summary findings. The Tower Commission did not, however, find any conclusive evidence of illegality on either end of the Iran-Contra affair, though it admitted that its legal investigation was not exhaustive, and it exonerated Reagan of any attempted cover-up. As R. W. Apple of the New York Times summarized the meaning of the Tower Commission report, “This is not a portrait of venality. It is a portrait of ineptitude verging on incompetence.”
The Tower Report was the last nail in Don Regan’s political coffin: “More than almost any chief of staff of recent memory, he asserted personal control over the White House staff and sought to extend his control to the national security adviser. He, as much as anyone, should have insisted that an orderly process be observed.” Regan was in the grip of the kind of pincer movement that Washington’s media and political class had down to an art form, and he was out a week later. His replacement was the man who had posed the fatal question to Nixon (“What did the president know and when did he know it?”), former Tennessee senator Howard Baker. One dramatic sign of how demoralized the White House had become was the suggestion that Baker and the cabinet consider invoking the Twenty-fifth Amendment, which provides for the involuntary retirement of the president in the event that he is unable to discharge the office due to incapacity.
The Tower Commission broke down Reagan’s last resistance to acknowledging that the Iran initiative, however it began and whatever he thought its best motives might be, had degenerated into a ransom scheme. A few days after gulping through the Tower Commission’s briefing in the White House, Reagan faced the public in a televised address from the Oval Office.
“A few days ago, I told the American people that I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions tell me that was true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.”23 He again denied knowing of the diversion of funds to the Contras, “but as president I cannot escape responsibility.” There would be “no more freelancing by individuals when it comes to our national security.”
The speech worked. The New York Times noted, as Reagan’s staff had expected, that “not since John F. Kennedy took the blame for the catastrophic Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 has any president so openly confessed error.” Opinion polls showed an immediate uptick in public approval for Reagan; for the first time in three months, he was back over 50 percent (51 percent in the CBS News poll). It was Reagan’s second recovery from a very low public approval rating (the first being in 1983 when the economy turned around), making him the first and only president ever to come back from two such steep swoons in public esteem. Reagan was ready to move on, but this was not the end of the story, nor even the end of his political peril. Congress still had to get in its licks. The completion of the Tower Commission’s work was merely intermission; the climax was just beginning.
* * *
IN TYPICAL FASHION, the intricate and sordid details that fed the Washington theater surrounding Iran-Contra and the sustained outrage of what might be called the scandal industry subsumed the deeper constitutional and political issues at the heart of the matter. While it was wholly legitimate to investigate whether the CIA violated the Boland Amendment or whether McFarlane, North, and their compatriots violated the Arms Export Control Act and other statutes, there was something perverse about the fact that, in regard to the diversion of funds to the Contras, Congress and an independent counsel were looking to criminalize a policy that Congress now approved.
The constitutional controversy over Iran-Contra was the latest skirmish in the institutional struggle between the president and Congress to control foreign policy. The tensions between the president and Congress over foreign policy go back to the Founding, as the Constitution is deliberately ambiguous about the dividing line between the branches. The Constitution singles out the president as the commander in chief of the armed forces—giving him the power to make war—as well as denoting his clear authority to conduct foreign policy and diplomacy. Yet the Constitution reserved for Congress the power to declare war, as well as the power of the purse over the military and the “advice and consent” function on treaty making. In fact, a seldom-noted clause of Article I holds that no congressional appropriation for military purposes “be for a longer term than two years,” a restrictive clause undoubtedly owing to the Republican suspicion of standing armies. But there is no express requirement of congressional consent for the president to make war, and in fact Congress has formally declared war only five times in American history, while the nation has engaged in more than a hundred armed conflicts, always at the instigation of the president.
Congress was within its rights to deny using taxpayer funds for the Contras, but whether it could restrain the president from supporting the Contras in other ways, such as soliciting private support or support from other nations, is doubtful. Private American support for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War was mentioned as a precedent (and indeed, several left-wing groups such as CISPES sent private funds to the Marxist guerillas in El Salvador in the 1980s), along with the powerful precedent of President Franklin Roosevelt transferring fifty U.S. destroyers to Britain in defiance of the Neutrality Act—a step that, legally speaking, was arguably just as impeachable as any of the Reagan administration’s actions. The Wall Street Journal’s L. Gordon Crovitz put his finger on the crux of the issue: “The same Constitution can’t give Presidents Wilson and Roosevelt the power to get the country into world wars, while at the same time deny today’s executive branch the right to send TOW missiles to Iran and funding to the contras.”24 To which might be added that there was something obviously wrong with a legislative landscape in which it was permissible for the administration to provide support to anti-Communist resistance forces in faraway Afghanistan, Angola, and Cambodia but not in nearby Nicaragua.
By its very nature as a plural body, the legislative branch cannot be as responsible and accountable as the executive branch—a distinction that was much on the mind of the Framers in Philadelphia in 1787.25 In fact, there is a strong case that it was the inconstant actions of Congress that led to the circumstance in which a marine lieutenant colonel was operating major foreign policy initiatives on behalf of the president—initiatives that would have been legitimate in the absence of pusillanimous congressional restrictions. It is highly debatable whether any version of the Boland Amendment legally applied to the president and his staff. But if the fundamental constitutional latitude of the president to conduct foreign policy limited the reach of the Boland Amendment, then its limits on executive branch agencies such as the CIA were perhaps equally dubious. Ironically, the person who best understood this was Oliver North, who sent a memo to Poindexter in June 1986 that read: “What we most need is to get the CIA re-engaged in this effort so that it can be better managed than it is now by one slightly confused lieutenant colonel.”
Reagan would have vetoed most or all of the five successive Boland Amendments had they been presented to him as stand-alone laws rather than wrapped into omnibus budget bills that he could not veto without shutting down the government.26 But neither did he ever challenge the constitutionality or legal reach of Boland, either directly through litigation or through signing a statement that would have put an executive branch interpretation on the record.
The constitutional questions involved are essentially unsolvable in any bright-line way because of the necessary ambiguity of executive power itself.27 During the course of the Iran-Contra affair numerous scholars and intellectuals dusted off John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government—the text that had been the primary inspiration for the Declaration of Independence. Locke’s understanding of the nature of prerogative in the executive was equally important to the Founders as they designed the office of the presidency. Locke defined prerogative simply as “nothing but the power of doing public good without a rule” (emphasis in original). Why “without a rule”? Because, Locke explained, “[M]any things there are which the law can by no means provide for…. [M]any accidents may happen wherein a strict and rigid observation of the laws may do harm.” Indeed, Locke went as far as to say that “it is fit that the laws themselves should in some cases give way to the executive power…. [The executive must have] the power to act according to discretion for the public good, without the prescription of the law, and sometimes even against it” (emphasis added).28
Locke’s defense of prerogative is plainly a holdover of the historical latitude of European monarchs, whose frequent abuses prompted the rise of parliamentary democracy. Executive prerogative is a concept that cannot by its very nature be delimited through formal legal means, and as such it sits uneasily within the context of American formalistic constitutionalism. In the view of the Founders the abuse of executive prerogative is meant to be checked by the separation of powers, and congressional oversight and legislation are both necessary and proper. But even within congressional assertion of its own prerogative to check executive power, the residue of the Lockean understanding of the executive’s latitude for action is evident. The National Security Act, for example, recognizes the general need for secrecy and discretion by providing that the president must notify Congress about covert operations “in a timely manner,” but there are no legislative or judicial parameters of timeliness. Reagan never notified anyone in Congress of the Iran initiative during the year prior to its exposure in November 1986. But obviously if he had it would have been on the front page of the Washington Post the next day, just as deliberations of possible covert actions against Libya in 1986 were leaked to the Post and caused the idea to be abandoned.29
Examples of presidential use of prerogative power in American history include Jefferson’s decision to consummate the Louisiana Purchase despite his own constitutional doubts, Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus in 1861 (the Constitution expressly stipulates that suspension of habeas corpus “in times of rebellion” is a congressional, not executive, power), Theodore Roosevelt’s sailing of the Great White Fleet in 1907 in the absence of congressional authorization, and Franklin Roosevelt’s various transgressions of the Neutrality Act.30 These and other examples fit Alexander Hamilton’s conception in the Federalist of the presidency as the locus of the government’s “extensive and arduous enterprises.” Jefferson, channeling Locke, argued in 1810: “A strict observance of the laws is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when it is in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence of written law, would be to lose the law itself.”31 On the other hand, Nixon showed the limits of the concept when he infamously argued that “[i]f the president does it, it’s not illegal”—an assertion the American public rejected.
Between Jefferson and Nixon, how is this delicate matter to be judged? While scholars and constitutional lawyers will argue for bright-line standards, the example of Nixon suggests the answer that Locke gives explicitly: the people shall judge. “The people,” Locke wrote, “observing the whole tendency of their actions to be the public good, contested not what was done without law to that end, or, if any human frailty or mistake—for princes are but men, made as others—appeared in some small declinations from that end, yet it was visible the main of their conduct tended to nothing but the care of the public. The people, therefore, finding reason to be satisfied with these princes whenever they acted without or contrary to the letter of the law, acquiesced in what they did.”32
The outcome of the constitutional struggle over the Iran-Contra matter would be decided in the same way—by public judgment of the political clash in Washington. Reagan and his political advisers, noting low poll numbers on his Nicaraguan policy, had shied away from a sustained public fight over the issue. On the other hand, moderate Democrats didn’t want to be tagged with the responsibility for “losing Nicaragua” and halfheartedly supported Contra aid some of the time at least. The scandal put an end to this debilitating equilibrium and forced the partisan divisions into the open. The American people finally paid close attention to the most extensive debate to date on the issue of Central America, albeit confused by its combination with the ill-considered Iran initiative. What Democrats and the media didn’t grasp was that the arms sales to Iran were much more objectionable to the public than was the covert support of the Contras. But it was the Contra diversion that played to the political left. Senator Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), the co-chair of the subsequent congressional investigation, made clear in his opening statement that it was the Contra diversion that was the chief target of the investigation. Democrats immediately seized upon the fund diversion angle to attempt to cut off the Contras once again. “They will not get another nickel,” an aide to Senator Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) told a reporter. In March the House voted by a margin of 230–196, largely along party lines, to withhold the final $40 million of Contra aid that had passed the year before; a week later the Senate voted down the same measure by the close vote of 52–48. (Eight Republican senators voted with most Democrats for the cutoff.)
Like Watergate, Iran-Contra was portrayed as a legal controversy, and there were direct echoes of Watergate, such as the query “What did the president know, and when did he know it?” If Reagan could be shown to have known about the dubious diversion of funds to the Contras, he could be impeached and potentially convicted. Historian Louis Fisher, author of a leading study of presidential war powers, argued: “If President Reagan had authorized the theory propounded by Poindexter and North, he would have invited, and deserved, impeachment proceedings.”33 If the cherished goal of impeachment proved out of reach, at least the investigation could be used to put the nail in the coffin of Reagan’s Central America policy. “No one wanted another Nixon,” Theodore Draper wrote, while Democratic congressman Lee Hamilton, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said, “There’s no one who wants to see a presidency crippled.” Both statements were nonsense. No amount of legalese could disguise the partisan and ideological fault lines at the base of the scandal. Congressional Democrats licked their chops at the prospect of televised summer hearings, at which the ghosts of H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, Howard Hunt, John Dean, and Gordon Liddy would haunt the visages of McFarlane, Poindexter, and especially Iran-Contra’s Hunt and Liddy analogue, Oliver North. Just as North was the key figure in generating the scandal in the first instance, he would now be the pivot on which the scandal reached its denouement.
The Democrats, who now ran both houses of Congress, made three key decisions that altered the dynamic of the subsequent Iran-Contra hearings to their detriment. First, they decided to form a special joint House-Senate committee co-chaired by Senator Inouye and Representative Lee Hamilton (D-Ind.), instead of allowing each house to conduct its own separate hearings, which would be duplicative, cumbersome, and confusing. But this meant that the committee would include feisty House Republicans such as Henry Hyde, Jim Courter, William Broomfield, and especially House GOP whip Dick Cheney—Republicans used to brawling effectively against Democrats on the House floor. Among the Senate Republicans on the joint committee, only Utah senator Orrin Hatch matched the fighting spirit of the House Republicans. Second, because North invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, the committee struck a bargain with the reluctant independent counsel, Lawrence Walsh, to grant North immunity in exchange for his testimony. Democrats were convinced that North would be the star witness and the key to the success of the hearings. Third, North’s aggressive defense counsel, Brendan Sullivan, won a crucial concession from the committee in addition to immunity: he got the committee to waive deposing North privately before his appearance at the public hearings. Unknown to most of the viewing public, most high-profile congressional hearings are largely scripted in advance by means of prior depositions. In this case, the committee didn’t know what North’s testimony would be.
Democrats weren’t worried by this concession. The committee had been very tough on many of the witnesses preceding North. But it did not go according to the Watergate-revival script. Several of the early witnesses gave robust performances before the committee, especially retired air force major general Richard Secord, the point man in North’s Contra supply operation, and former national security adviser Robert McFarlane. The public was reacting negatively to the televised hearings. Fred Barnes observed, “Both the members and the staff seemed mean, prosecutorial, petty, and unfair.”
Committee Democrats thought North would turn things around. Much of the testimony was highly damaging to him, culminating with the testimony of Justice Department attorney Charles Cooper, a highly respected conservative, that North could not be trusted to tell the truth, even under oath. The White House had begun putting as much distance as possible between themselves and North, calling him a “rogue colonel.” “The committee members and staffers expected a ritual sacrifice, with North the victim,” Michael Ledeen recalls. North had reportedly been hospitalized for “emotional distress” in 1974 (though no medical records of this could be found), and “[h]ours were spent discussing what to do if, as many of them fully expected, North broke down in the witness chair.”34 Senate Democratic counsel Arthur Liman promised a “rigorous cross-examination” of North “in full view of the American people.” Many of the Republicans on the joint committee were ready to cast North to the wolves.
On the morning of July 7, 1987, North showed up in the Senate Caucus Room on the third floor of the Russell Senate Office Building—the same room where Joe McCarthy had held forth in the 1950s and the Watergate hearings of 1973 had taken place—dressed in his crisp marine officer’s uniform, festooned with six decks of service ribbons and a row of medals. North’s formal military bearing and rugged handsomeness offered a stark visual contrast to the motley appearance of his chief inquisitors, Democratic legal counsels John Nields and Arthur Liman. Opposite North, both men appeared slightly seedy; one reporter called Nields “the most wonderful geek I’ve ever seen.” Nields sported a mop of stringy, greasy hair, near shoulder length in back but receding in front. Liman’s visage was even worse; with his wavy black hair and round face (not to mention caustic demeanor) he resembled H. L. Mencken out of the 1940s. Liman became, in the words of Brit Hume of ABC News, “the Howard Cosell of the hearings—the man the TV audience would love to hate.”
Democrats were determined to get right to work on North, invoking a seldom-enforced rule denying North the opportunity to make an opening statement to the committee because he had failed to submit his statement forty-eight hours in advance. Directly Chairman Inouye turned the hearing over to House Democratic counsel Nields. North may have been imprudent and untruthful, but before the committee his was not the countenance of a guilty man. He understood that offense is the best defense and charged at the committee as if he were charging an enemy position on the battlefield, quickly turning the tables and never yielding the initiative for the duration of his seven days of testimony.
From the outset it was clear Nields was after evidence and testimony that would incriminate Reagan, and to set perjury traps with which to ensnare North. North promptly blunted Nields with a stout defense of the propriety of covert operations and a lecture on the constitutional principle of the separation of powers. Sometimes Nields led with his chin, giving North perfect openings to display his brio.
MR. NIELDS: [Covert] operations are designed to be secrets from the American people?
LT. COL. NORTH: Mr. Nields, I’m at a loss as to how we could announce it to the American people and not have the Soviets know about it….
MR. NIELDS: In certain Communist countries, the government activities are kept secret from the people. But it’s not the way we do things in America, is it?
LT. COL. NORTH: I would like to go back to what I said just a few moments ago. I think it is very important for the American people to understand that this nation is at risk in a dangerous world. And that they ought not to be led to believe, as a consequence of these hearings, that this nation cannot or should not conduct covert operations. By their very nature covert operations or special activities are a lie. There is great deceit, deception practiced in the conduct of covert operations…. The American people ought not to be led to believe by the way you are asking that question that we intentionally deceived the American people, or had that intent to begin with.
Nields had the wit to see he was losing this debate and changed tactics, but North had established his mastery.35 North defiantly celebrated that he had shredded documents and lied to Congress, confounding the efforts of the committee to put him on the defensive. Nields’s efforts at sarcasm fell flat.
MR. NIELDS: When you pushed the “delete” button on the PROF system, it didn’t erase your memory, did it?
LT. COL. NORTH: No.
North, who had won a famous boxing match against James Webb (in 2006 elected a Democratic U.S. senator from Virginia) at the Naval Academy, got in many effective jabs at Nields.
MR. NIELDS: I think the first thing to do is refer you to Exhibit 18. That is a chronology that bears the date and time, November 17, 1986, two thousand—which I take is 8 p.m.
LT. COL. NORTH: Twenty hundred.
MR. NIELDS: I’m sorry, twenty hundred.
LT. COL. NORTH: Military time.
It was a small slip on Nields’s part, but it reinforced the contrast between the duty-conscious military officer and the partisan civilian lawyer. Another exchange:
LT. COL. NORTH: I have Exhibit 88. Begins with a unit?
MR. NIELDS: Yes. And up at the top it says F. M. Goode [a code name].
LT. COL. NORTH: Yes.
MR. NIELDS: I take it you were Goode?
LT. COL. NORTH: I was very good.
But it was North’s long soliloquies attacking Congress and defending the “freedom fighters” and “democratic resistance” in Nicaragua that proved most resounding.
LT. COL. NORTH: I don’t know, to this day, what the President knew I, personally, was doing. I hope to God that people were keeping him apprised as to the effect of it. Because if we hadn’t done it, there wouldn’t have been a Nicaraguan resistance around when the Congress got around to putting up $100 million for it—sir…. The President ought to be aware of what a handful of people did to keep the Nicaraguan resistance alive at a time when nobody in this Congress seemed to care. And it’s important that the President know that good men gave inordinate amounts of time, and some gave their lives, to support that activity. And some of them have been brutally treated by what has come about in these two parallel investigations—brutally treated.
North ended the first day on a high note.
MR. NIELDS: And [the President] certainly didn’t tell you to stop?
LT. COL. NORTH: Why would he? We were conducting a covert operation to support the Nicaraguan resistance, to carry out the President of the United States’ stated publicly, articulated foreign policy. Why should he tell me to stop? We weren’t breaking any laws, we were simply trying to keep an operation covert.
He might as well have added: You got a problem with that?
Nields questioned North for a second full day, during which North readily admitted lying to Congress, falsifying and destroying key documents, and conducting covert operations without correct legal authorization, arguing that “we all had to weigh in the balance the difference between lives and lies.” He also said defiantly, “I still, to this day, counsel, don’t see anything wrong with taking the Ayatollah’s money and sending it to support the Nicaraguan freedom fighters.” Most important, though, was his spirited defense of executive prerogative:
LT. COL. NORTH: [T]his great institution can pass laws that say no such [covert] activities can ever be conducted again. But that would be wrong, and you and I know that. The fact is, this country does need to be able to conduct those kind of activities. And the President ought not to be in a position, in my humble opinion, of having to go out and explain to the American people, on a biweekly basis or any other kind, that I, the President, am carrying out the following secret operations. It just can’t be done. No nation in the world will ever help us again—and we desperately need that kind of help—if we are to survive, given our adversaries.
On the third day of his testimony North was finally allowed to give his opening statement, and he unloaded on Congress for its lack of responsibility and seriousness in the conduct of foreign policy:
I believe that it is a strange process that you are putting me and others through. Apparently, the President has chosen not to assert his prerogatives, and you have been permitted to make the rules…. One thing is I think for certain—you will not investigate yourselves in this matter. There is not much chance that you will conclude at the end of these hearings that the Boland Amendments and the frequent policy changes therefore were unwise or that your restrictions should not have been imposed on the Executive Branch. You are not likely to conclude that the Administration acted properly by trying to sustain the freedom fighters in Nicaragua when they were abandoned, and you are not likely to conclude by commending the President of the United States who tried valiantly to recover our citizens and achieve a vital opening that is strategically vital—Iran.
North was just warming up. He reached back and threw a roundhouse punch directly at Congress:
It is difficult to be caught in the middle of a constitutional struggle between the Executive and legislative branches over who will formulate and direct the foreign policy of this nation…. [S]ome here have attempted to criminalize policy differences between co-equal branches of government and the Executive’s conduct of foreign affairs. I believe it is inevitable that the Congress will in the end blame the Executive Branch, but I suggest to you that it is the Congress which must accept some of the blame in the Nicaraguan freedom fighters’ matter. Plain and simple, Congress is to blame because of the fickle, vacillating, unpredictable, on-again off-again policy toward the Nicaraguan Democratic Resistance…. [By cutting off funds] the Congress of the United States left soldiers in the field unsupported and vulnerable to their Communist enemies. When the Executive Branch did everything possible within the law to prevent them from being wiped out by Moscow’s surrogates in Havana and Managua, you then had this investigation to blame the problem on the executive branch. It does not make sense to me. In my opinion, these hearings have caused serious damage to our national interests. Our adversaries laugh at us, and our friends recoil in horror.
North punctuated these prepared remarks with extemporaneous panegyrics to a soldier’s duty during Liman’s ineffective cross-examination:
LT. COL. NORTH: Let me make one thing very clear, counsel. This Lieutenant Colonel is not going to challenge a decision of the Commander in Chief, for whom I still work. And I am proud to work for that Commander in Chief. And if the Commander in Chief tells this Lieutenant Colonel to go stand in the corner and sit on his head, I will do so…. I saluted smartly and charged up the hill. That’s what lieutenant colonels are supposed to do.
North was dramatic, emotional, animated, and devastatingly effective. The nation, hitherto uninterested in or dubious of Reagan’s Central America policy, was suddenly riveted by the spectacle of North humbling the committee. Not since the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954 had anyone so humiliated a congressional committee investigation.36 Senators William Cohen (R-Maine) and George Mitchell (D-Maine) wrote afterward that the contest of “one Marine against twenty-six lawyer-politicians wasn’t even close. North held a Gatling gun while we sat like ducks in a shooting gallery. The American people loved it.”37 Newt Gingrich was ecstatic, telling a reporter, “The country, for the first time in my lifetime, saw the left wing of Congress face to face.” The Wall Street Journal’s Suzanne Garment, who called Iran-Contra “the scandal Olympics,” observed, “The post-Watergate operating rules had boomeranged on the legislators, who discovered that he who lives by the tube can die by the tube.”38
North became an instant cultural phenomenon: Olliemania was born. A deli in Pennsylvania began offering the Ollie Sub—thinly sliced steak on a roll with “shredded lettuce” (emphasis in original menu), while a California café concocted an Ollie North shredded cheese omelet and Ollie’s Gottem Buffaloed Burger made with bison meat. Before North was done testifying, more than $100,000 in unsolicited cash poured into his legal defense fund; within a month he had banked $1.4 million. In the ensuing months he became the hottest attraction for conservative groups and GOP candidates, who had yet to learn of North’s more reckless and unreliable side. Capitol Hill offices were flooded with more than 150,000 pro-North letters and telegrams, the largest avalanche of mail since Nixon fired Archibald Cox at the height of Watergate in 1973. More than five thousand calls came into the White House, with only 222 expressing criticism—the rest were in enthusiastic support. USA Today set up a North hotline and received 66,973 calls by the end of his first week of testimony; 58,863 were pro-North, with many urging that he be given a medal. When North was spotted getting out of a car near his lawyer’s Seventeenth Street office late in the week of his testimony, Washington pedestrians applauded and cheered. Marine Corps recruiting offices reported anecdotal accounts of an uptick in enlistment inquiries. Even TV network news coverage warmed to North. On CBS, correspondent Bernard Goldberg noted that “in a world where so many lack convictions, we’re drawn to people who passionately believe in what they’re doing and then do it.” Liberal Hollywood producer Norman Lear told the New York Times, “I can’t take my eyes off it. I’ve seen every second of it.” OLLIE NORTH FOR PRESIDENT T-shirts quickly appeared at the tourist kiosks along the National Mall. North’s hairstyle became a momentary fashion; barbers reported a surge in requests for the “Ollie cut.” Book publishers lined up to sign him as an author.
Few of the Democrats on the committee deigned to argue with the geopolitical or constitutional views North offered. Recall the revealing comment of Contra aid opponent Representative Mike Barnes (D-Md.) the year before: “We just didn’t have the votes if Reagan ever presented it that way.” Well, North had now “presented it that way” with the whole nation watching and debating the issue attentively for the first time—and applauding the valiant marine. A Newsweek poll found that a 48 percent plurality thought the committee was harassing North; a Los Angeles Times poll found that only 6 percent thought the committee was being fair, and more people thought Congress was to blame for the scandal than the president, by a margin of 43 to 30 percent. Support for the Contra cause surged. A Washington Post/ABC News poll found that two-thirds of the public would have approved if Reagan had okayed the diversion to the Contras. As North’s testimony continued, several Democrats on the committee began to make prominent mention of their prior support for the Contras.39
Over the weekend, Democrats took stock and recognized that they were being routed. When North resumed his testimony the following Monday, Senator George Mitchell, a former prosecutor and federal judge, argued eloquently that North didn’t have a monopoly on patriotism, closing with a plea to North to “respect the patriotism and motives of those who disagree with you.” Senator Inouye attempted a clumsy and morally obtuse comparison of North to the Nazi defendants at the Nuremberg trials (“just following orders”), drawing a sharp blast from North’s attorney, Brendan Sullivan. Inouye had overruled all twenty-two objections Sullivan made during the course of North’s testimony, contributing to Inouye’s image as a hanging judge. Outside the hearing room Democrats fumed. Illinois senator Paul Simon, a declared candidate for president in 1988, said, “Oliver North is not a hero.” Representative Richard Gephardt of Missouri, also gearing up for a presidential campaign in 1988, told an audience in New Hampshire, “When people walk over the law, they shouldn’t be celebrated, they should be thrown in jail, and that’s where he belongs, with all of his charisma.” “North put the Constitution through the shredder,” he added, “making Watergate look like a Sunday school picnic.”40 And Gephardt was a moderate among Democrats. A few moderate Republicans openly dissented from the conservatives. New Hampshire senator Warren Rudman offered a profile in leadership in lecturing North that “the American people have the constitutional right to be wrong…. if the American people say enough, that’s why this Congress has been fickle and has vacillated.”
But it was too late to turn around the North juggernaut. The last two days of North’s testimony were mostly long speeches by committee members, with most Republicans, emboldened by North’s performance, joining the attack on the committee. Seizing on a mistake of Liman’s, Republicans managed to enable North to present his pro-Contra slide show that he had used to assist private fund-raising efforts. (Dick Cheney yielded his allotted time for this purpose.) Polling data showed that North’s presentation to the committee boosted popular support for the Contras, closing a fifteen-point gap between opposition and support to Contra aid to a dead-even proposition. Whatever hope remained that the hearings might implicate Reagan were decisively ended when Poindexter, who appeared immediately after North, testified that he had not informed Reagan of the diversion of funds to the Contras. “The buck stops with me,” he told the committee. “This was the bombshell I’ve been waiting for 7 months,” Reagan wrote in his diary that night. “The day is brighter.”
In the end, the attempted congressional coup against Reagan’s foreign policy—which might have culminated in Reagan’s impeachment—fell flat.41 It was a remarkable turnabout. In January a New York Times/CBS poll found that the public trusted Congress more than the president to make the right decisions on foreign policy by a 61 to 27 percent margin. Congress had squandered that advantage. The disappointment in newsrooms was palpable. Haynes Johnson wrote in the Washington Post that “it seems almost certain now that there will be no impeachment.” Foreign media got the point too; Le Monde wrote, “Congress could have won a lot from the process, but was unable to score even one point.” Committee co-chairman Lee Hamilton effectively threw in the towel at the end of the hearings by saying, “The solution to the problems of decision-making revealed in these hearings lies less in new structures or new laws than in proper attitudes.” Had the hearings gone better, congressional Democrats surely would not have settled for new attitudes but would have demanded new concrete prerogatives to share foreign policy making with the executive, modeled after the War Powers Resolution of 1973 that was enacted in the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate. The committee produced a seven-hundred-page final report in November that, while harshly critical of the White House, drew back from finding criminal fault: “The Committees make no determination as to whether any particular individual involved in the Iran-Contra Affair acted with criminal intent or was guilty of any crime.”42 In the fullness of time North, Poindexter, and other targets of the independent counsel’s investigation would never be charged with violating the Boland Amendment or the Arms Export Control Act and were at length charged mostly with secondary legal violations such as lying to Congress and, in North’s case, accepting an illegal gratuity. Reagan breezily dismissed the committee report: “They labored, and brought forth a mouse.”
Republicans filed a strongly argued minority report that was in equal parts critical of the Democratic majority in Congress and of President Reagan—for not defending executive prerogative vigorously enough. As the minority report noted, “A substantial number of the mistakes of the Iran-Contra affair resulted directly from an ongoing state of political guerrilla warfare over foreign policy between the legislative and executive branches…. The Administration decided to work within the letter of the law covertly, instead of forcing a public and principled confrontation that would have been healthier in the long run.” As for Reagan, the minority report said: “The President’s inherent constitutional powers are only as strong, however, as the President’s willingness to defend them…. Thus, the President should have vetoed the strict Boland Amendment in mid-October 1984, even though the Amendment was only a few paragraphs in an approximately 1,200 page long continuing appropriations resolution, and a veto therefore would have brought the Government to a standstill within three weeks of a national election…. Matters of war and peace are too important to be held hostage to government decisions about funding Medicare or highways.” Representative Henry Hyde was more direct in his separate opinion, appended to the report: “There are members of the House and Senate who do not believe that Communism in Central America is a grave threat to peace and freedom that requires a vigorous response from the United States…. We have had a disconcerting and distasteful whiff of moralism and institutional self-righteousness in these hearings. Too little have these committees acknowledged that the Executive may well have had a clearer vision of what was at stake on Central America.”
The grand irony of the affair was that Oliver North, the man who almost single-handedly brought down the Reagan presidency, turned out to provide the most robust and effective defense of the Reagan Doctrine. Conservative columnist M. Stanton Evans observed, “Ollie North was able to do in six days of testimony what the rest of the Reagan Administration hadn’t been able to accomplish in six years,” and National Review lamented, “The Administration’s Central American policy should not have had to wait two years for a lieutenant colonel of the Marines to present it forcefully.” But even as they lauded his performance, a few conservative leaders discerned the difficulty with North. David Keene of the American Conservative Union remarked, “North has performed heroically before the committee, but even if you’re a good man with good motives, it doesn’t mean you can’t mess things up.” North’s actions, Keene added, “have damaged our ability to aid the Contras and crippled the President.”43
Despite these few conservative misgivings, the liberal onslaught over the Iran-Contra crisis had helped to alleviate Reagan’s fraying relationship with many conservatives, who in 1987 were starting to become restive about Reagan’s impending arms control agreements with the Soviets. Conservatives resented the way the media and liberals were attacking Reagan over Contra policy, and rallied to his cause. By this time Reagan wanted to put the matter behind him and move on. After the hearings concluded in early August, Reagan reprised his February speech:
Secretary Shultz and Secretary Weinberger both predicted that the American people would immediately assume this whole plan was an arms-for-hostages deal and nothing more. Well, unfortunately, their predictions were right. As I said to you in March, I let my preoccupation with the hostages intrude into areas where it didn’t belong. The image—the reality—of Americans in chains, deprived of their freedom and families so far from home, burdened my thoughts. And this was a mistake.
My fellow Americans, I’ve thought long and often about how to explain to you what I intended to accomplish, but I respect you too much to make excuses. The fact of the matter is that there’s nothing I can say that will make the situation right. I was stubborn in my pursuit of a policy that went astray.
The other major issue of the hearings, of course, was the diversion of funds to the Nicaraguan contras. Colonel North and Admiral Poindexter believed they were doing what I would have wanted done—keeping the democratic resistance alive in Nicaragua. I believed then and I believe now in preventing the Soviets from establishing a beachhead in Central America. Since I have been so closely associated with the cause of the contras, the big question during the hearings was whether I knew of the diversion. I was aware the resistance was receiving funds directly from third countries and from private efforts, and I endorsed those endeavors wholeheartedly; but—let me put this in capital letters—I did not know about the diversion of funds.
Yet the buck does not stop with Admiral Poindexter, as he stated in his testimony; it stops with me. I am the one who is ultimately accountable to the American people. The admiral testified that he wanted to protect me; yet no President should ever be protected from the truth. No operation is so secret that it must be kept from the Commander in Chief. I had the right, the obligation, to make my own decision.
Reagan announced changes to the management of future covert action procedures, and then changed the subject to economic matters.44
* * *
ALTHOUGH REAGAN HAD survived the firestorm and to a small extent saw his larger policy aims in Central America vindicated, the nine-month saga had left the Contras in limbo and frozen Reagan in place. In the middle of the hearings Reagan wrote in his diary, “I don’t see how I can do anything until they close down this investigation.” For the moment the Contras had the resources to carry on as an effective fighting force, and in 1987 they fielded as many as ten thousand men, often routing Sandinista forces in battle. Like the Afghan mujahadeen, the Contras supplied with better weapons were exacting a higher toll; as much as 60 percent of Nicaraguan territory was contested, and the Nicaraguan economy was near collapse.45 The Contras shot down as many as ten Mi-24 helicopters in the first half of 1987. But there was little confidence Congress would approve new aid when U.S. funds ran out in a few months. Reagan included $180 million over the next two years in his current budget proposal but was rebuffed by Democratic congressional leaders. And there remained the fundamental ambiguity that had plagued the policy from the beginning: were the Contras out to overthrow the Sandinistas or get them to allow genuine democratic reforms? The commander of the U.S. Southern Command, General John Galvin, testified to Congress in the spring that the Contras could win a protracted military struggle, overturning the conventional wisdom up to that point. Some conservatives were outspoken in the view that if Congress wouldn’t support the contras, Reagan should consider breaking off diplomatic relations, recognizing an exile government, and perhaps invading Nicaragua. Human Events editorialized: “[T]here is a growing school of thought in both diplomatic and military circles that only a Grenada-style invasion can eventually salvage Nicaragua from Marxist-Leninist control.”46
Two new players soon entered the fray and altered the political landscape: Costa Rica’s new president, Oscar Arias, and new U.S. House Speaker Jim Wright. Elected in 1986, Arias broke with previous Costa Rican policy. He declared that henceforth Costa Rica would be neutral in the Nicaraguan conflict, which meant the Contras were no longer welcome to make bases in and conduct sorties from Costa Rica. Arias also opposed further U.S. military aid to the Contras and called for an end to the Contras’ military efforts. But he also spoke critically of the Sandinistas, refused to include Managua on his itinerary of regional state visits, and called for negotiations between the Sandinista “dictators” and the Contras. These reversals and inconsistent gestures marked Arias as an opportunist and an unstable partner for diplomacy.
Encouraged by Senator Christopher Dodd, who was in regular contact with Nicaragua’s Washington embassy during this period, Arias soon emerged with his own full-blown regional peace plan that aimed not only to resolve the Nicaraguan civil war but also to end the guerilla struggles of El Salvador and Guatemala. It was a plan plausible only to a high school civics class (or the UN General Assembly): cease-fires on all sides, amnesty for all guerilla fighters, “comprehensive dialogue” to achieve “national reconciliation,” political pluralism, and scheduled elections. Although the Arias plan appeared to put unacceptable political conditions on the Sandinistas, its requirement that the Contras disband also made it unpalatable to Reagan, who pronounced it “lousy” in his diary. (Unlike the successive Contadora proposals of 1984–86, the Arias plan didn’t require that Nicaragua reverse its arms buildup or reduce the number of Soviet and Cuban advisers.) Reagan noted in an entry about a White House visit by Arias in September 1987: “[Arias] admitted to being concerned that the Sandinistas would try to cheat & agreed the contras should be supported. Then he went up to Congress & reversed himself.” Amidst the agony of the Iran-Contra scandal, however, the Arias plan caused Reagan fits. Robert Kagan observed, “The very inconsistency of Arias’s proposals made them attractive to members of Congress who, in the aftermath of the Iran-Contra scandal, were looking for a way out of their own political impasse.”47 When the Senate passed a resolution endorsing the Arias plan by a vote of 97–1, Reagan reluctantly gave a lukewarm endorsement to Arias’s efforts. Fortunately, Honduras and El Salvador were publicly unenthusiastic about the Arias plan. Arias stubbornly refused to discuss changing his scheme, and his initiative began its inevitable collapse.
House Speaker Jim Wright then entered the picture. With political sentiment on Capitol Hill rubbed raw by the Iran-Contra debacle, the White House hoped it could avoid another bitter battle for Contra aid by reaching a compromise with Speaker Wright, whose position on Contra aid was thought to be less fixed than Tip O’Neill’s had been. The White House essentially offered to make Wright a full partner in making Central American policy: Wright and Reagan would put forward their own peace proposal, and if the Sandinistas refused, Wright would support another installment of military aid for the Contras. Many House Democrats feared it was a Reagan trap, but the crafty Wright thought he could turn the tables on Reagan and agreed to move forward with the idea. Wright wanted to kill Contra aid but was wary of Democrats being blamed as the party that lost Nicaragua in the event that things went badly. He sought to maneuver Reagan into conditions that would amount to a bipartisan bug-out.
The opening to Wright was a major blunder, as it surrendered the political advantages of the collapse of the Iran-Contra hearings. Wright began conducting his own diplomacy, contacting Nicaragua’s ambassador to the United States to inquire about the Sandinistas’ willingness to enter peace talks with the United States. At length Wright struck a deal with the White House that called for a cease-fire in place in Nicaragua, during which time the United States would suspend military aid but continue humanitarian aid. In return the White House agreed not to demand a Hill debate on new Contra funding for at least two months (this became known as the “gag rule”), while, Wright hoped, Olliemania would dissipate. Wright and the White House were immediately disabused of the hope that this gambit would dampen the partisan and ideological fervor over the issue. Democratic opponents were unhappy, and conservatives inside Congress and in the administration cried betrayal. There were fresh calls from the right for Reagan to fire Secretary of State Shultz, even though Shultz privately shared their dismay. Shultz wrote, “Getting close to Jim Wright was not a pleasant experience…. He could smile at you while he cut your throat.”48
The Sandinistas muddled the picture once again by rejecting the Wright-Reagan proposal, calling it “a declaration of war against Nicaragua.” The other Central American countries announced their rejection of Wright-Reagan soon after, greatly cheering the White House. But then Arias reentered the picture, brokering a deal between Nicaragua and El Salvador at a meeting in Guatemala that represented a sellout of the Contras more or less along the lines of the original Arias proposal. (For this effort Arias would receive the Nobel Peace Prize two months later, in a transparent attempt by the Nobel Committee to hobble Reagan’s Contra support even further.) Wright immediately hailed the agreement, saying that there was no need for further military aid to the Contras. The White House was stunned but hoped to make the best of things by pressing hard against the ambiguities of the agreement and pushing back against Wright’s position on ending Contra aid. Reagan countered with an announcement that Shultz was willing to meet directly with Ortega so long as the Contras and regional leaders were included in the talks.
The White House opening to Wright had failed to defuse the partisan split over Nicaragua but had elevated Wright to the position of co-equal partner in making policy, mistakenly conferring legitimacy on congressional foreign policy meddling. Matters now depended on whether the Sandinistas would follow their previous pattern of maladroit moves that undermined Democratic opposition to the Contras back in Washington; as National Review worried, “the Sandinistas will not be stupid forever.” The agreement, which called on Nicaragua to cease its support for Marxist guerillas in El Salvador and lift its restrictions on political opposition at home, was controversial within the Sandinista directorate back in Managua. In a secret meeting in mid-August, Daniel Ortega reassured his comrades that he had no intention of ceasing support for revolution in Central America, and the Sandinistas told the Salvadoran guerillas that they would step up arms shipments. Ortega told the directorate, “As in the case of Vietnam, we will win this war in Washington,” adding that the Sandinistas must do nothing to undermine Speaker Wright or “anything that will upset the majority vote in Congress.”49 Identifying Wright as a “parallel power” to Reagan, the Sandinistas went so far as to invite Wright to serve as the official mediator of regional peace talks. Wright sensibly demurred from this formal role but later engaged in more of his own freelance diplomacy by holding meetings with Sandinista and Contra representatives in an attempt to broker a deal. The normally stolid Shultz wrote that “Jim Wright was trying to blindside President Reagan and me, subvert our policies, and become the de facto secretary of state in the process. This was outrageous!” Wright backed down only when Reagan publicly (and more forcefully in private) attacked Wright for his recklessness—a sentiment that found editorial echo in the Washington Post.
Back in Nicaragua someone down the line didn’t get the memo about staying on good behavior, and when opposition groups attempted a peaceful march in Managua on August 15, Sandinista police set upon them with riot sticks, cattle prods, and attack dogs. The leaders of the march were arrested and jailed for thirty days, and the lifting of restrictions on political opposition was postponed indefinitely. (The New York Times covered the story on page 4, the Washington Post on page 15.) Democrats in Washington were dismayed and told the Sandinistas in blunt terms not to make such a stupid mistake again. The Sandinistas reluctantly backed off, lifting press censorship for the first time in years and allowing opposition political forces to rally publicly. La Prensa resumed publication and wasted no time before staking out a position of strong opposition to the Sandinistas. The Sandinistas calculated that they could allow just enough liberalization to forestall additional Contra aid from Congress, and they still resisted negotiating with the Contras, whose growing popularity inside Nicaragua drew the notice of the front page of the New York Times in the fall of 1987.50
A fresh revelation in December dealt the Sandinistas another blow in Washington. A high-ranking Nicaraguan defector, Roger Miranda, revealed that the Sandinistas had secret plans to expand their army to six hundred thousand men and that the Soviets would increase their military supplies to the regime. The White House initially suspected Miranda was a plant—the Sandinistas had run false-flag defectors before—but when the Sandinistas confirmed the accuracy of Miranda’s information, congressional Democrats were once again embarrassed and angry. Wright complained that Nicaragua was “snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.” Congress voted for a short-term extension of Contra military aid to the end of February 1988.
As the year drew to a close both the United States and Nicaragua had achieved part of their political aims. The prospects for further Contra military aid in Congress remained uncertain, but, as Kagan summarized, “[T]he Sandinistas found themselves in precisely the position they had hoped to avoid. They had permitted enough of an opening to allow an emboldened opposition to be heard by the world.”51 With a year to go in Reagan’s presidency, the fear among the Contras and other Central American nations was that the Sandinistas would run out the clock, hoping a Democrat would succeed Reagan in 1989 and end Reagan’s policy. Ortega candidly expressed his objective in the summer of 1988: “The revolution stays and Reagan leaves.” Virtually all of the announced Democratic candidates for president in 1988 had stated that they would end Contra aid once and for all if elected.
The uncertainty in Washington led to political and military ambiguity in Nicaragua in the early months of 1988. In February the Senate approved, on a 51–49 vote, new military aid for the Contras, but the House voted it down twice. With the Contras once more running low on military supplies in the absence of a fresh U.S. commitment (and with the CIA once again prohibited from providing assistance), their offensive began to wither and the pendulum swung in favor of the Sandinistas. As the Contras withdrew to their bases in Honduras, the Sandinistas launched a major offensive designed to finish them off, an act that again dismayed centrist Democrats in Washington and revived the prospects for new military aid. When Sandinista troops crossed into Honduras in force in March, Reagan announced he was dispatching the 82nd Airborne to Honduras. It had the desired effect; fearing a direct American attack, the Sandinistas halted their offensive and suddenly relented in their opposition to negotiating directly with the Contras.
What followed was an ambiguous interim agreement neither side wanted but both needed, calling for a cease-fire that, significantly, allowed the Contras to keep their weapons and remain in place in designated safe havens. This represented a major concession from the Sandinistas, but it gave the Sandinistas what they needed most—a respite from the specter of renewed U.S. military aid while they ran out the clock on Reagan’s second term. It got Democrats in Washington off the hook—Wright and other Democrats pressured and advised the Sandinistas on the course they should take, and Ortega publicly thanked Wright for his help after the deal was struck. Congress passed a large package of humanitarian aid to keep the Contras intact, and the Contras and the Sandinistas entered months of negotiations over political reform and a permanent end to the civil war. The White House had little optimism for these negotiations and took the unusual step of sending copies of the 1973 Vietnam Peace Treaty to American embassies throughout Latin America as a reminder that Communist nations regard diplomacy as war by other means. Amidst endless waves of recrimination and mistrust between the Contras and their supporters back in the United States, the negotiations made little progress and eventually broke down. Déjà vu: the Sandinistas re-arrested opposition leaders, suspended publication of La Prensa, and shut down the Catholic Church’s radio station.
Robert Kagan summarized the state of affairs as the 1988 election campaign was reaching full swing: “The intransigence on both sides was the product of a divided American Congress which could not choose between abandoning the contras and letting them fight the Sandinistas.”52 The problem of Nicaragua was going to be held over for Reagan’s successor, whoever it might be. The eruption of the Iran-Contra scandal had neither ended nor compelled a final decision in favor of Reagan’s policy. A stalemate was better than a rout of the Contras but less favorable than the downfall of the Sandinistas. The inter-branch struggle over foreign policy would continue.
* * *
THE OLLIE NORTH show wasn’t the only incandescent scene on Capitol Hill in the second half of 1987. In late June, with almost no prior notice, Associate Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell abruptly announced his retirement. Reagan swiftly announced his choice to replace Powell: Robert Bork, the name that everyone had expected since 1981. Conservatives were ecstatic Richard Viguerie said, “This is the most exciting news for conservatives since President Reagan’s re-election.” Bork was to jurisprudence what North was to geopolitics; surely the Senate Judiciary Committee would be no match for this brilliant mind.
Thus began an unprecedented political firestorm that would funamentally reorder judicial politics for decades to come.